


My Internal and External Motivations

by ryssabeth



Series: Situational Irony [10]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 01:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/755204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryssabeth/pseuds/ryssabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He feels gross and exhausted and very much alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Internal and External Motivations

Enjolras’ eyelids try and stay closed when he opens them, peeling against the tiredness of too many late nights spent on a paper that he can’t remember writing—but knows he did, because his fingers are stiff and the beginnings of a beard make his chin itch. This would be the part, he supposes, where he’d groan and roll over, if he were in his own bed.

But he is not. (He doesn’t think as well in his own flat, anymore, for reasons that aren’t _beyond_ him so much as difficult to explain.)

This bed is Grantaire’s, the indent in the old mattress where Enjolras lies a little too slight to be his own. And the comforter and sheets smell of Grantaire’s laundry detergent, the only kind he can manage to use.

And there is the clicking of what sounds like a camera shutter—and then the almost-silent wind of a polaroid being shaken.

“What are you doing?” Enjolras asks, his tongue a heavy weight in his mouth, thick with sleep, or not enough of it, as he arches against the stoney stiffness of too long spent in the same place. He’s careful to keep the fabric of the sheets around him. He’d rather not face the chill of the room just yet.

“Taking photos,” Grantaire replies. “Because sometimes you’re in an agreeable mood to let me draw you half-asleep, and other times you aren’t, and since you were when I asked fifteen minutes ago, I decided to preserve this moment for the times that you aren’t.”

Enjolras snorts, feeling loose limbed enough to venture another attempt at opening his eyes. Grantaire sits, tucked in a chair meant for the small desk in the corner of his bedroom, a sketchpad open on his lap with a stack of polaroid photos stacked upon it. He’s dressed, but barely. Settled in a pair of black sweatpants and a faded T-shirt that probably had a band name on it at one point, but has peeled so far beyond recognition that Enjolras doubts this is an outfit he wears outside his flat. “Hardly the stuff that should be in sketchbooks,” he says, rubbing the comforter against the stubble on his face, an irritant, now that his paper is finished and turned-in.

“ _Exactly_ the stuff that should be in sketchbooks,” and Grantaire sets his work aside, dropping the pile and the sketchpad upon the small chest of drawers pressed against the wall. “Probably, even,” he murmurs, sitting instead on the edge of the bed, “the stuff of museums and poetry or something.”

He scoffs. “Not with three days’ worth of facial hair and morning breath.”

“Noon breath,” Grantaire corrects with a snicker, crawling over Enjolras to bracket his hips with his knees, his hair skewed and probably unbrushed, but Enjolras is hardly one to pass judgment on appearances at the moment. “More like early afternoon breath, because it’s a little after one. But now I’m just being unnecessarily specific.”

“It’s because you like to talk too much.”

That earns him a shrug—and then his spine bows and Grantaire’s nose brushes against his own and he can feel a grin against his mouth. “Good morning, Sunshine.”

“If you insist on calling me that at every available opportunity,” Enjolras replies quietly, tracing the words carefully against Grantaire’s mouth with lips that are too chapped, though he doesn’t seem to mind, “try and save it for the morning.”

“The sun is still out and will always be out as long as you’re here _so_ —“ he does stop speaking then, planting his lips against Enjolras’ in a firm kiss, before he moves his face to the crook of Enjolras neck and shoulder, bunching around him like another blanket, but all angles and edges. And then there is a murmur into his skin. “I have a very important thing to ask you.”

“No, you can’t sell drawings of me to the general public.”

“You always see right through me,” and Enjolras can feel a smile. “But no, uh. It’s actually—“ he pauses and his knees tighten against Enjolras’ hips, his face pressing closer to the bare skin of his neck and shoulder. “Do you want to move in with me? Since—I mean you’re here so often anyway, and.”

The _and_ is it. He doesn’t continue. The silence stretches before them, undisturbed except by breathing. And so Enjolras braves the chill of the flat to push at the comforter and at Grantaire, rolling him onto his side on the other half of the bed (and his expression is bemused).

“And?” Enjolras presses, curling and uncurling his fingers in stretches before he searches out Grantaire’s hand and finds it.

(He’s nervous about this question—he’s been nervous about it since he realised he _has_ been living here. And he doesn’t know what he’d do if he’d asked and Grantaire had laughed at him.)

“I’m not—well, I’m not drinking as much.” (Enjolras had noticed—but he hadn’t said anything, in case Grantaire shut down, or fell back into the bottom of a bottle and couldn’t get back out again.) “And I think—it’s probably your fault. And so, I thought that—if you wanted, I could. Maybe I could stop, one day, and—I don’t know.” Grantaire’s eyes flicker around the room, hovering at the window where the sun creeps through the curtains. (Terrible curtains, really, they don’t do much good.)

“I’d like to,” Enjolras says, running his tongue along the dryness of his lips, even though it still feels thick and disgusting. “Move in with you. I’ve got stuff here anyway it’s—yeah. I’d like to.”

Grantaire half-smiles, and the fingers that Enjolras had found squeeze around his. “I love you,” he says. Grantaire saves his—which is surprising, he supposes. He saves his _I love yous_ , holding them until he can’t anymore, waiting for moments where they carry the most weight. Enjolras is more liberal with his. Soft murmurs into his curls or on his cheek or during movies or when one of them is going out the door.

Enjolras says it so Grantaire doesn’t forget.

Grantaire says it so that Enjolras always remembers.

“Even though I have noon breath?”

“Even though you’ve got _really terrible_ noon breath.” And, suddenly, Grantaire rolls out of bed, stretching his arms high above his head, revealing his bellybutton under the hem of his shirt. “Which we can fix, in the bathroom. Perhaps before a shower.”

“I am not adverse to such conditions.”

Grantaire smiles—more than a half-smile, less than a full one. “You’ll have to get out of our bed first.”

( _Our bed_. It’s something he only said to feel the weight of it on his tongue. And it’s something Enjolras only thought to feel the prickle of it in his mind.)

“You’ll have to make me.”

That gets him a full smile—eyes and face and everything—as a reward.


End file.
